How to Draw Celtic Patterns

Celtic patterns incorporate a complex juxtaposition of circles arranged in patterns such as the Dara Knot, but with patience and guidance you can learn to draw these patterns yourself. View an expert demonstration in this free video of drawing lessons.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Dori Decamillis. Today, we're going to learn how to make Celtic patterns. Okay, I've already got it lightly drawn out because it's pretty complicated, and it will take us too long to do in a short video if I don't. What I did was, I started my drawing, my outside rim. You can use a compass or a tracing circle to do that then I divided it down the center two ways, so I'm cutting it into quarters and then I made reference points pretty close to those lines and drew an arch here, here, here and here from those center points. Then from these two little points I drew circles that connected them, basically just a round circle, an almost circle, not complete circle that comes from those two points to the center and coming back around. This particular Celtic knot is called the Dara Knot. It represents the roots of an oak tree and it represents internal fortitude. So from there, it's a matter of making the wide bands under and overlap and basically when you draw down from the point that you created this line, one's going to go over and one's going to go under and as you keep drawing from there it kind of just makes sense. This is going to go over on this side, from this point, one goes over, the other goes under. That means automatically from this side, this one's going to go over and this one's going to go under and of course, that one is going to go over and this one is going to go under. So, that's how you remember it. I'll do it again, under, over, over, under, and then it is going to loop around. This one's coming over, under, that means this one's under, that one's over and if that's going over, they're going to loop around like that and then I can make my outside border more strongly outlined to go along with it. And this has been how you draw a Celtic knot.